Field of the Disclosure
The technology of the disclosure relates to on-line collaborations, such as conferences (including, as non-limiting examples, audio conferences, video conferences, and/or text chat conferences) and waves.
Technical Background
Collaborations, such as conference calls, allow two or more people to communicate. Typically, to setup a collaboration among multiple participants, a meeting organizer schedules a meeting time, and reserves a conference bridge for availability during that time. The meeting organizer distributes the conference bridge phone number for the meeting. At the appropriate time, participants dial the conference bridge phone number to join the collaboration.
Though collaborations may allow a plurality of participants to remotely communicate, participants of such collaborations may encounter various impediments to productivity. For example, if a collaboration participant wishes the participants of the collaboration to start a particular application to facilitate or be used during the collaboration, problems may be encountered. For example, some collaboration participants may not have the application available on their personal computer. The collaboration participant may not have conceived of a need to use the application for the collaboration until participation in the collaboration began. Thus, there may have been insufficient notice for an information technology (IT) department to have obtained a license and/or to have installed the application on personal computers of the collaboration participants before the collaboration began. Furthermore, the members of the collaboration may work for different organizations within a company or for different companies altogether. Thus, there may be no common information technology (IT) department for providing a licensed application for all the collaboration participants before the collaboration begins. Different collaboration participants may have different versions of a same application installed on their personal computers. The different application versions may be incompatible. Some members of a collaboration may not have a valid software license to execute the application. Some members of a collaboration may not have a valid software license to execute a certain version of the application.
One approach is for a collaboration participant to share their desktop with other participants of the collaboration. In this manner, the collaboration participant may present one instance of a licensed application to the other participants of a collaboration. The collaboration participant may share her desktop in two ways: read-only, or with full access. If the shared desktop is shared read-only, other participants may not collaboratively manipulate the application. If the shared desktop is shared with full access, collaboration participants may also view or change other portions of her shared desktop. All collaboration participants may not have the same screen sharing application software and/or version on their personal computer. Firewalls may restrict screen sharing applications running on the personal computers of the participants from communicating with one another. Furthermore, screen sharing only provides one instance of an application. Accordingly, screen sharing also does not address instances where greater interactivity or productivity could be achieved with multiple application instances for the participants of the collaboration. Furthermore, a participant or participant user device may not be licensed to provide, perform, and/or display (for example, publically or non-publically) a personally licensed or other licensed copy of an application for group use. In this regard, for example, a participant may not be licensed to provide, perform, and/or display an application for use by other participants of a collaboration using screen sharing.